2012: Year of the Facebook Timeline

I busted out the new Facebook Timeline today, available in beta to Facebook developers. Here are some of my initial thoughts, and screenshots of the new design.

My initial impression is that this is a big win for Facebook. As you can tell from my blog, I’m already a fan of the masonry style design. It’s just a better way to organize information. The new design also makes it much easier to “creep” (as the kids say), with a floating nav bar off to the right of the profile. Broken down by year and month, this navigational timeline is very user-friendly and will make it easy to dig up older content. Thus, 2012 will be the year of the Facebook Creepers.

Birth of the Facebook Long Tail

Couple this with the addition of a real-time “news ticker”, and I think Facebook will also see a resurgence of activity on older posts. Let’s say you’re browsing through a friend’s timeline and find a great picture of him from 6 months ago. When you comment on it, that activity will now be displayed in the Ticker of all your friends. Dozens of them will be online when it happens, and with one click they can view the picture and comment on it directly from their News Feeds. What does this mean for Facebook? It means they have significantly increased the useful life of content on their site. Say hello to the Facebook Long Tail.

The old design was great for viral sharing, but events had a very short lifespan if they did not explode right away. This new timeline and news ticker gives older content an equal chance of going viral. It’s another huge innovation for the Facebook team.

Facebook also gives you the option to add “life events” that may have occurred before you had a Facebook account. Upload pictures of your wedding from 2001, or pictures of your little sister when she was born. Now people will be even more dependent on Facebook to store digital memories. But I suspect Zuckerburg is thinking even bigger than this.

The Death of Google+ …and LinkedIn?

The most recent changes to Facebook’s news feed and the addition of customized subscriptions was certainly a reaction to Google+. In one fell swoop, I think they have killed the momentum of Google. But nobody is talking about what the new Timeline means for other social networks like LinkedIn. If you scroll through the screenshots above, you’ll notice the “About Me” section of the timeline. This section puts a strong emphasis on professional history.

That wasn’t done by accident. Facebook realizes they are in danger of following in the footsteps of MySpace; branded as a purely recreational site. And I believe this is their first big step toward re-branding Facebook as a personal-professional site.

Here’s another prediction: In 2012, Facebook will start focusing more on LinkedIn as a direct competitor. With their new privacy controls, Facebook could easily push users to create public (professional) profiles. You can already display work history and qualifications on your “About” page in a format that is cleaner and more accessible than a LinkedIn page. Down the road, this could create another significant revenue stream for Facebook, if hiring managers were able to pay for targeted search results like they can on LinkedIn. Facebook’s new “Subscribe” button is paving the way for this new era of “professional Facebooking,” as industry leaders are now beefing up their profiles and lending credibility to the idea. Once this catches on among mainstream users – and it won’t take long – LinkedIn better watch out.